Disappointment for Rahul Gandhi

The Congress party is headed to a disappointing fourth-place finish in the Uttar Pradesh state polls.

Votes are still being counted, but as of Tuesday afternoon the Congress party is headed to a disappointing fourth-place finish in the Uttar Pradesh state polls.

Given the huge effort Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi put into U.P., campaigning around the state relentlessly in recent weeks and months, is this vote a repudiation of him and a big blemish on his political resume?

Or is it unfair to pin the blame on Mr. Gandhi, given that all along he has made the pitch that Congress is looking at a long term rehabilitation of its fortunes in a state where it hasn’t been in power in 22 years?

Since politics is always a game of perceptions, it partly depends on the final numbers. As of Tuesday afternoon, the Election Commission of India website had the Samajwadi Party leading in 193 seats and the Bahujan Samaj Party leading in 90 seats. The Bharatiya Janata Party is leading in 47 seats while Congress is leading in 40.

So Mr. Gandhi, who represents a U.P. constituency in Parliament, and his backers might spin the early results as a decent increase for Congress over its 22 seat total in the 2007 state election. But that’s not the way the story is likely to play out or be interpreted by the rest of the political establishment in India.

B.G. Verghese, a veteran political analyst, said the result is a setback for Mr. Gandhi and a lesson for the Congress party that they’re putting too much focus on his career prospects and not enough on governing the country.

“The results show (Mr. Gandhi) hasn’t been able to deliver,” Mr. Verghese said. “The issue for Congress has been whether Rahul’s whiskers will grow by half an inch rather than whether the (central) government can move forward. They have their priorities hopelessly wrong.”

Last year, Congress had much, much higher hopes in U.P. There was talk in the party of winning more than 100 seats. Party workers were begging Mr. Gandhi to put together a sustained, energetic campaign in the state – seeing him as their best bet to vault to relevance and challenge Chief Minister Kumari Mayawati of the BSP.

Mr. Gandhi had already laid some groundwork in U.P. He visited some of the poorest areas of the state in the past year, hearing the concerns of villagers and sleeping in their homes – trips that were widely covered in the media and began to shape his image as a populist. He lent support to farmer protests against Ms. Mayawati’s controversial land acquisition programs.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Gandhi didn’t pull any punches. He railed against not just Ms. Mayawati – whom he accused of running a corrupt regime and squandering central government money that was supposed to go to development programs – but also every other party. He said the Samajwadi Party, which is likely to form the next government, promises too much and delivered little in its previous stints in power.

Against that backdrop, the verdict for both Congress and Mr. Gandhi looks like a major disappointment.

“We could have done a lot better, but we put up a spirited campaign,” Sachin Pilot, a Congress party member of Parliament who is minister of state for information technology, said on the NDTV news channel.

Will the results dampen Mr. Gandhi’s chances of making a run for prime minister in 2014 when the next national elections are held, should he choose to do so? Maybe not.

Political scientist Priyankar Upadhyay said if Mr. Gandhi had led the Congress to a landslide victory in U.P. it would have “definitely paved the path” for him to become a prime ministerial candidate. His inability to make big gains in U.P. for Congress may “postpone” but “not hamper” his career prospects, he said.

Mr. Gandhi still has time to make a mark on the national scene—and analysts frequently note the lack of viable alternatives to lead the party in the 2014 general elections.

Congress is likely to make it a high priority in coming months to pass a bill greatly expanding national food subsidies, a priority of his mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi. If Mr. Gandhi is able to come to the fore in that debate and take credit for food security improvements, he’d have a populist issue to take to voters.

But today, it seems, wasn’t Rahul’s day.

Thus far, Mr. Gandhi hasn’t made any public statements about the result. Perhaps it’s too early.

But some analysts say it’s important that he takes responsibility. “Everyone in the Congress party is falling over themselves to take responsibility,” said Indian Express editor Shekhar Gupta on NDTV. “I would really like Rahul Gandhi to step forward and say ‘I am responsible’ – it would make him a national leader.”